“A majority of our students are trapped in schools that are underperforming,” Bush said. “Some schools don’t work and refuse to change, and that’s why we need school choice.”

“We want our voices to be heard,” said Rebekah Anthony, a fundraiser for the charter school chain IDEA Public Schools. “Parents and families make the conscious effort to enroll their students here because they believe it is the best opportunity for their students.”

The event comes with the trappings of corporate-funded public relations campaigns: expensive advertising, celebrity endorsements, and even an official song and dance.

In Texas, voucher plans have been scotched repeatedly at the Legislature, thanks largely to an alliance of rural Republicans and big-city Democrats.

Louis Malfaro, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), told the Observer the school choice movement doesn’t have popular support.

“The majority of Texans are against privatizing public schools,” Malfaro says. “This is a damn sideshow, and to waste time on it is still irrelevant to the vast majority of students in the state.”

Some voucher opponents, including Karen Miller, the former legislative chair for the Texas Parent Teacher Association, raised concerns about students missing school to attend a political rally.

“If busloads of public school kids missed school for a rally,” Miller said, “conservative groups would be hot on the case and very critical.”

Several charter school administrators said that the rally was a good learning experience for the students. “This is an opportunity for them to learn what it means to be engaged in government,” Anthony told the Observer.

Research has shown that vouchers and charter school have failed to improve student achievement consistently. Opponents also argue that the initiatives drain money from public schools and may lead to increased racial segregation.

Analysts say that vouchers have a better chance of passing this legislative session because of the elevation of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a diehard voucher supporter, and other conservative Republicans who favor school choice.

Advocating for these initiatives has become part of a larger right-wing agenda of privatizing government-run services.

Vouchers have been around for more than a century, but it wasn’t until the economist Milton Friedman’s influential 1955 paper, “The Role of Government Education,” that vouchers became a pet cause of the right. Friedman’s birthday has been an occasion for free-market advocates and school choice supporters in Texas to celebrate his ideas.

The popularity of charter schools has made them the fastest growing school choice option across the nation. A few states and city school systems have also adopted some form of school vouchers. The movement has attracted super-rich supporters and profiteers into what Jeb Bush dubs the “education marketplace.”

At today’s rally, his son George P. Bush said one thing that both sides of the debate can agree on.

“We are training the future leaders of Texas, right here and right now, and we have to do it right,” Bush said.

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